Friday Game News

OK it is the start of the long weekend – well once my wife gets back from school where she had just a little more to do to be ready for students on Tuesday. So it is time to think about some game news. OK so I’m thinking about more help to create games since I really think that turning consumers into creators should be a goal. So hear now the news.

The Popfly team announces a bunch of new features. The Game Creator has gone from alpha to beta and with this there are badges to earn, new profile pages, and new features that let you include your own images, videos and sounds into Popfly games. And more. Plus for mashups there is a new string formatter and several new blocks including a slide show display block. Read about it here and then try out Popfly.

For all you XNA fans out there, Dan Waters announces a new video in his series on creating GuitarrMatey 3D XNA game that uses the guitar from Garage Band. If you are interested in learning how to make a 3D XNA game from scratch this is a series you want.

Sam Stokes has started on a series on getting started with web and video game design on his blog. Besides XNA I believe he will be doing web games with Silverlight. Should be an interesting series. Sam teaches a college course in game development BTW.

Just to fill out the post and send some link love to some people I like and respect plus as an added bonus link to some career stuff: Randy Guthrie has started a series of blog posts on how to prepare for and get started with careers in the computer/technology field.

And Diane Curtis starts blogging at the Springboard blog started by Hilary Pike. This is the school to career blog which regularly, and probably even more regularly now, posts information for students who are thinking about their careers.